Whiteroom
Century of Innocence – The History of the White Monochrome, Liljevalchs, Stockholm 2001
Century of Innocence – The History of the White Monochrome is a large-scale exhibition examining the history of the white monochrome within modern and contemporary art. Curated by Bo Nilsson, the exhibition was first presented at Rooseum, Malmö.
Michael Ellburg and I were invited to contribute what was then the most recent work in this historical trajectory—an artwork that both relates to and tests the limits of the white monochrome tradition.
The exhibition brought together artists who, in different ways, have explored reduction, materiality, perception, and spatial experience. Participating artists included Kazimir Malevich, Yves Klein, Robert Ryman, Piero Manzoni, Ellsworth Kelly, Lucio Fontana, Sol LeWitt, Sherrie Levine, Wolfgang Laib, Günther Uecker, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz West, Jan Schoonhoven, Henk Peeters, Jason Martin, Karin Sander, Katya Sander, Herbert Zangs, and Rémy Zaugg, alongside Swedish artists such as Ola Billgren, Rune Hagberg, Anders Kappel, Per Mårtensson, and Sonja Larsson.
Our contribution, Whiteroom, consisted of an entirely white room placed inside the exhibition space—a room within a room. The work was constructed with a strongly luminous, woven ceiling, white matte-painted walls, and a wave of white, shimmering epoxy paint that broke out from the inner white cube.
In Whiteroom, the white monochrome was no longer approached as an image or a surface, but as a spatial condition. Light, material, and architecture combined into a physical and perceptual experience in which the boundary between containment and transgression—between control and the material’s own agency—became central. The work entered into dialogue with the historical lineage of the white monochrome while shifting it from representation toward embodied and spatial experience.